Monthly Archives: November 2009

The Silver Falcons, official display team of the South African Air Force perform at an air show at AFB Overberg.

Unlike the display teams of many other air forces the Silver Falcons pilots are not dedicated to the team only. Team pilots are all instructors at the Central Flying School based at AFB Langebaanweg and can only spend their spare time practising for their displays.

Each display starts and ends as a five ship formation, with the body of the display alternating between manoeuvres by this four ship formation and the solo display pilot. The team currently flies the Pilatus PC-7 Astra.

As I’m going to an air show on Saturday I ordered a larger memory card for my camera from an online retailer last week. It should have been delivered today but instead I received a phone call apologising for a supplier delay. As I will only receive the card next week I started looking around at local stores to buy a card before the show.

There’s a new Dion Wired store in Somerset Mall so I took a look at their web site and spotted a 4GB SanDisk Ultra II card for R399 and decided that’s what I would buy.

Knowing they close at 6pm I left work at five and stopped off at the mall. I was disappointed at first as there were only SanDisk Extreme III and Extreme IV cards on display; I wasn’t going to buy those as their extra speed is wasted in my camera and they are much more expensive. Luckily it turned out that there were some of the Ultra II cards under the counter. However they were marked at R419.95 and not the R399 I had been expecting. When I mentioned this to the person assisting me he said he would check, which involved him taking the card to a cashier and having her scan the barcode. When the scan confirmed the R419.95 price he simply said “That’s the price”. I thought that he might offer to give me the card at the price reflected on the web site, but no such offer was made. Even when I declined to buy the card at the inflated price he simply shrugged, as if to say “We don’t need your business anyway.”

I understand that mistakes can be made and web sites may get out of debt but in cases such as this I would at the very least expect to be offered the product at the lower, advertised price. Their failure to make such an offer smacks of false advertising, intended simply to get you into the store where you may be willing to capitulate and pay the higher price. I am not prepared to do so and would rather take my business to a smaller store where I may have to pay that little more but where I can expect good service and will know that I am not being cheated. I will certainly think twice before considering Dion Wired as a potential shopping venue in the future.